centipede 0.2.1dev

Centipede is a WSGI microframework with a simple decorator based router.

Centipede is a WSGI microframework with a simple decorator based router. It’s strength is that it models the technology in use and tries not to confuse developers with complex patterns and tricks. It inherits strongly from urlrelay.

Installation

$ pip install centipede

Defining handlers

With Centipede you expose functions to urls. Functions either return a string or a tuple. A string is treated as the document body, http status is set to 200 OK and returned to the browser. Should you return a tuple, status code, body and headers are expected. The expose decorator also supports a few arguments.

from centipede import expose, app

@expose('^/$')
def index(request):
    """ Simple Hello IgglePigglePartyPants
    """
    return 'Hello IgglePigglePartyPants!'

@expose('^/google$')
def index(request):
    """ A redirect
    """
    return (307, '', {'Location':'http://google.com'})

import json

@expose('^/twitter$', 'GET', content_type='application/json')
def twitter(request):
    """ Return your twitter status
    """
    return json.dumps({
        'status' : 'My awesome and insightful twitter status. #blah'
    })

application = app()

Expose arguments

The expose decorator looks like this:

expose(url_pattern, method=None, content_type='text/html', charset='UTF-8')

Request

The parameter passed to the functions exposed - in the examples above named request - is the WSGI environ dictionary.

Templates

I would recommend keeping your html templates static on the client side and use a javascript template library. But if you really need some server side templating, have a look at mako.

Deployment

For deployment it is a good idea to run your centipede application behind a good WSGI server. There is a bunch. Gunicorn is good. I usually end up running uwsgi behind nginx.

enjoy.